The instant invention is directed to a testing device which is operative to test the resilience or hardness of an athletic playing surface. In the last decade, artificial playing surfaces for substantially all sports have become the norm. Sports such as football, baseball, tennis, wrestling and others all employ synthetic playing surfaces. It is also important that resiliency of natural playing surfaces fall within selected limits. For purposes such as safety, consistency, effectiveness, etc. it has been deemed beneficial to bring or keep the resiliency or hardness of these surfaces between limits.
As a result a need for testing equipment to insure that playing surfaces fall within selected limits evolved.
There exists testing equipment for the above described purpose such as illustrated by U.S. Pat. No. 5,390,535. The existing equipment does not protect the flight of the dropped missile from interference nor does the result reach a high level of accuracy.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide surface testing apparatus which is easily set up for testing the surface of an athletic playing area.
Another object of the invention is the provision of surface resilience testing equipment which provides for substantially unrestricted flight of the test missile.
Another object of the invention is a surface resilience testing apparatus which produces a recordable electronic signal.
Another object of the invention is a surface testing apparatus which produces a graph of the surface resilience.